on the occasion of The Human Sexuality Collection's 25th Anniversary Exhibit

As someone who was once introduced not as a "Stonewall Lesbian"— but as a Stonehenge Lesbian— it is a disconcerting historical moment for older LGBT activists. I do have a better understanding of what might have prompted Oscar-winning Sally Fields to gush, “You like me! You really, really, really like me.”

But I don’t trust it. I do not trust any creeping, premature triumphalist strain in LGBT narratives.

So in response, I start to lay out for "Jethro" the forty-five year version of Kickstarter we did. He was on the way to the open bar before I even got to the part about the Daughters of Bilitis.

Really, how did we do it? And how do we tell our story? First you have to know the story. And we’ve got help. For years, way under the radar, historians, academics, archivists, anthropologists, both professional and amateur, have been collecting, saving, okay hoarding and preserving the quotidian thinginess of the LGBT movement.

Now our stories are coming out of closets, basements and self-storage units in a great blooming of LGBT history. Museums, archives, and collections are springing up in cities all over the country in former strip malls, universities and city libraries.

If you can’t get to the actual collections you can visit the recently revamped, wonderfully accessible OutHistory website for a wealth of LGBT historical information.

In telling the story of the LGBT movement, we too often become good little assimilated boys and girls and shy away from the movement’s original impulse – sex and sexual liberation. Fortunately, Cornell University Library’s Human Sexuality Collection has, for twenty-five years, gathered rare books, letters, photos and original artwork, films, erotica and ephemera related to sexuality.

Margaret Nichols, the Rare Materials Cataloging Coordinator for Cornell, oversees the cataloguing of everything in the Human Sexuality archive. It was she who petitioned the Library of Congress to add “Butch/Femme” to their Subject Headings. Those headings are how everything in the world gets catalogued in ALL libraries. Her proposal was finally accepted.

Jessica Tanzer's photos greeting us at exhibit... open til October 2014!

The recent opening of a “Speaking of Sex” exhibition at Cornell celebrates the 25th Anniversary of HSC's larger collection. I attended the opening with keynote speaker (and my partner!) Urvashi Vaid.

HSU's curator, Brenda Marston said it best: “Archiving sex is vital to our society...Without us making a real effort, our view of the past could keep settling on familiar and comfortable scenes.

"But at Cornell we make sure to wrest the camera away from the center and capture the stories we don’t always see, preserving the diversity of our culture.”

After we wandered through the wonderful exhibit, we talked about not only what was there, but what wasn’t there. Despite any archivist’s best efforts to tell the fullest history of the LGBT movement there are gaps. Many local archives are decentralized and volunteer-driven. And many of us assume that the stuff in our basements is not that important.